1. Field of the Invention
The present and related inventions generally concern (i) the machine-automated distribution, processing and network communication of streaming digital video/hypervideo, particularly upon digital networks having network content providers (nominally an "Internet Content Provider", or "ICP"), network service providers (nominally an "Internet Service Provider", or "ISP"), and network client subscribers/users/viewers ("client SUVs"). The present and related inventions also generally concern the provision of diverse sophisticated responses--including branching, storage, playback/replay, subscriber/user-specific responses, and contests--to SUV "click-throughs" on hyperlinks embedded within streaming digital hypervideo.
The present invention in particular concerns software processes operating at a special digital communications network server called a "Video On Web Server", or "VOW Server". This VOW Server does not normally serve streaming digital video, nor hypervideo (which instead comes from video servers that may be associated with any of content providers, network service providers, and/or third-party network sites such as advertisers) upon the network, but rather interprets hyperlinks present in streaming digital hypervideo when these hyperlinks are selectively exercised by individual client subscribers/users/viewers (SUVs) of the hypervideo. The hyperlink interpretation that is the field of the present invention is in particular directed to customizing the hyperlinked response(s) accorded each and every client SUV. As well as being customized to the individual client SUV, the responses are very diverse in nature, potentially invoking many different network resources at many different network locations.
2. Description of the Prior Art
2.1. Introduction to the Theory of Hypervideo
There is no requirement to read the present section 2.1--which section is based on the early investigations and research into hypervideo of Sawhney, et al., as transpired at MIT (reference cited below)--in order to understand the function, and, at a crude level, the purpose(s) of the present invention. However, hypervideo is, as of the present time (1998) very new, and few people have experienced it. The present section may accordingly beneficially be read in order to gain a "feel" for hypervideo.
More fundamentally, the present section discusses the considerable power of hypervideo, and ends with a discussion of the empowerment that hypervideo provides to a user-viewer. The present and related inventions, although they can be narrowly thought of as mere systems and methods for delivering lowly commercials in the hypervideo environment, are really totally consistent with the more profound, and the more ennobling, purposes of hypervideo. Therefore the present section may also beneficially be read to understand to what purposes--both good and ill--hypervideo may be put, and as background to how the present and related inventions serve these purposes.
In recent years Sawhney, et al., at MIT (reference cited below) have developed an experimental hypermedia prototype called "HyperCafe" as an illustration of a general hypervideo system. This program places the user in a virtual cafe, composed primarily of digital video clips of actors involved in fictional conversations in the cafe; HyperCafe allows the user to follow different conversations, and offers dynamic opportunities of interaction via temporal, spatio-temporal and textual links to present alternative narratives. Textual elements are also present in the form of explanatory text, contradictory subtitles, and intruding narratives. Based on their work with HyperCafe, Sawhney, et al. have been leaders in discussing the necessary components and a framework for hypervideo structures, along with the underlying aesthetic considerations. The following discussion is drawn entirely from their work.
"Hypervideo" can be defined as "digital video and hypertext, offering to its user and author the richness of multiple narratives, even multiple means of structuring narrative (or non-narrative), combining digital video with a polyvocal, linked text." Hypervideo brings the hypertext link to digital video. See Sawhney, Nitin, David Balcom, Ian Smith "HyperCafe: Narrative and Aesthetic Properties of Hypervideo." Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext. New York: Association of Computing Machinery, 1996.
An even earlier approach to hypermedia was proposed by George Landow, in which he offered rules for hypermedia authors, rules that took into account hypermedia's derivation from print media and technologies of writing. Landow proposed that hypermedia "authors" learn which aspects of writing applied to the emerging hypermedium, and which traits or characteristics needed redefinition and rethinking. He noted: "To communicate effectively, hypermedia authors must make use of a range of techniques, suited to their medium, that will enable the reader to process the information presented by this new technology." See Landow, George P. "The Rhetoric of Hypermedia: Some Rules for Authors." Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 1 (1989), pp. 39-64; reprinted in Hypermedia and Literary Studies, ed. by Paul Delany and George P. Landow, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991.
Hypervideo has its roots in both hypertext and film. As a result, hypervideo embodies properties of each field, but wholly can be placed in neither, for hypervideo is not strictly linear motion picture, nor is it strictly hypertext. This convergence known as hypervideo comments on each discipline, on their similarities, and on their differences. Hypervideo is potentially nonlinear, like hypertext, but displays moving images, like film. Hypervideo can signify through montage, like film, and can generate multiple dictions, like hypertext. Properties of each medium are present in hypervideo. These properties take on new forms and practices in hypervideo.
Hypervideo relocates narrative film and video from a linear, fixed environment to one of multivocality; narrative sequences (video clips followed by other video clips) need not subscribe to linearity. Instead of creating a passive viewing subject, hypervideo asks its user to be an agent actively involved in creation of text through choice and interaction. Hypervideo can potentially change viewing subject from a passive consumer of the text to an active agent who participates in the text, and indeed, is engaged in constructing the text.
Just as hypertext necessitated a re-reading of the act of reading and writing, hypervideo asks for a re-viewing of narrative film and film making and practices of viewing a film. Hypervideo redefines the viewing subject by breaking the frame of the passive screen. Hypervideo users are participants in the creation of text, as hypertext readers are.
Research is presently (circa 1997) projected to determine just how users of hypervideo systems navigate, interact with, and experience hypervideo-texts. Just as J. Yellowlees Douglas has exhaustively researched hypertext readers and the act of hypertext reading, similar projects are expected to be undertaken by hypervideo researchers. See Douglas, J. Yellowlees. "Understanding the Act of Reading: the WOE Beginner's Guide to Dissection." Writing on the Edge, 2.2. University of California at Davis, Spring 1991, pp. 112-125. See also Douglas, J. Yellowlees. "`How Do I Stop This Thing?`: Closure and Indeterminacy in Interactive Narratives." Hyper/Text/Theory, ed. by George P. Landow. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.
Hypervideo is related to film. Hypervideo has the potential to reveal important associations present in a film, and the constructedness of linear filmic narratives, and to this end, would be a beneficial tool for use with film studies education and research. Hypervideo can make available, by way of link opportunities, the different associations and allusions present in a filmic work. These associations are made manifest with hypervideo, made available for the student (or teacher) to see and explore. Relationships between different films can then be tracked, linked, commented on, revealed.
Hypervideo engages the same idea of "processing" that hypertext writing does: in writing hypertext, one makes available the process of writing, representing it visually (in the form of the web the writer builds), rhetorically (in the linking structure of the work, the points of arrival and departure present in the text)-and so one makes apparent the tensions and lines of force present in the act of writing, and the creation or reification of narrative. "Writing" hypervideo does the same for image-making-that is, makes clear the notion of constructing images and narrative. In the case of hypervideo, "narrative" refers to narrative film making. Just as hypertext has within it the potential to reveal the constructedness of linear writing, and to challenge that structure, hypervideo does the same for narrative film making-while also offering the possibilities for creating rich hypervideo texts, or videotexts.
How does narrative film function in hypervideo? Narrative film is necessarily re-contextualized as part of a network of visual elements, rather than a stand-alone filmic device. Because narrative segments can be encountered out of sequence and (original) context, even strictly linear video clips are given nonlinear properties.
Sergei Eisenstein pioneered the concept and use of montage in film. Hypervideo reveals and foregrounds this use. Eisenstein proposed that a juxtaposition of disparate images through editing formed an idea in the viewer's head. It was Eisenstein's belief that an idea-image, or thesis, when juxtaposed through editing, with another, disparate image, or antithesis, produced a synthesis in the viewing subject's mind. In other words, synthesis existed not on film as idea-image, but was a literal product of images to form a separate image-idea that existing solely for the viewer.
Eisenstein deliberately opposed himself to continuity editing, seeking out and exploiting what Hollywood could call "discontinuities." He staged, shot, and cut his films for the maximum collision from shot to shot, sequence to sequence, since he believed that only through being force to synthesize such conflicts does the viewer participate in a dialectical process. Eisenstein sought to make the collisions and conflicts not only perceptual but also emotional and intellectual." See Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. Fourth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1993.
Hypervideo potentially reveals this thesis/antithesis dialectic, by allowing the user to choose an image-idea (in this case, a video clip), and juxtaposing it with another image-idea (another video clip). Hypervideo allows the user to act on discontinuities and collisions, to engage with colliding subtexts and threads.
The user selects a video clip from a black canvas of three or four clips. Each clip lies motionless on the canvas. The user drags a clip onto another one, and they both start to play. Voices emerge and collide, and once-separate image-ideas now play concurrently, with one image extending the frame of the other. The user is left to determine the relationship between the two (or three or four) video clips.
Such video intersections recall Jim Rosenberg's notion of simultaneities, or the "literal layering on top of one another of language elements." See Rosenberg, Jim. "Navigating Nowhere/Hypertex Infrawhere." ECHT 94, ACM SIGLINK Newsletter. December 1994, pp. 6-19. Instead of language elements, video intersections represent the layering of visual elements, or more specifically, visual elements in motion. This is not to say that words, in the case of Rosenberg's Intergrams, are not visual elements; on the contrary, they are. In fact, their image-ness is conveyed with much more clarity (and even urgency) than are non-simultaneous words, or words without an apparent visual significance (save the "transparent" practice of seeing "through" letter-images into words into sentences into concepts). Once the word-images have to contend with their neighbor-layers for foreground screen space, their role in both the practice of signification (where meaning is contingent on what neighborly 0's and 1's are NOT), and as elements of a user interface (words that yield to the touch or click or wave of the mouse) become immediate and obvious. Nor is this to say that video clips aren't "language elements"; on the contrary, they are. The hypervideo clip is caught, as are words and letters, in the act of signification and relational meaning-making (. . . what neighborly 0's and 1's are not . . . ), mutable to the very touch of user, to the layers above and below.
The hypervideo author can structure these video intersections in such a way that only X and Y clips can be seen together, or X and Z if Y has already been seen (like Storyspace's guard fields), and so on, and the author can decide if a third video should appear upon the juxtaposition of X and Y. For example, Video X is dragged onto Video Y and they both start to play. The author can make a choice to then show video Z as a product, or synthesis, of the juxtaposition of Videos X and Y, that reflects or reveals the relationship between Videos X and Y. This literal revealing of Eisenstein's synthesis is made possible with hypervideo. Of course, no synthesis need be literally revealed; that can be left up to the viewer. While the interactions are structured by the hypervideo author or authors (as Eisenstein structured the placement and editing of thesis and antithesis idea-images), the meaning-making is left up to the hypervideo user. His or her choice reveals meaning to him with each video intersection; meaning in the system is neither fixed nor pre-determined. This empowering principle of hypertext is also a property of hypervideo.
2.2. Recent Practical Developments in Hypervideo
The V-Active HyperVideo Authoring Environment of Ephyx Technologies, Ltd. is a hypervideo authoring tool reportedly designed to develop interactivity in full-motion digital video applications. The V-Active product is based on a proprietary hypervideo technology that enables (i) automatic definition of objects, or hotspots, within an application's video stream and (ii) linking of those objects to video, sound, and text files, plus Web URLs.
Using an image processing algorithm, the V-Active' product is reported to define a video hotspot once and to then automatically maintain this hotspot across the video sequence. The software is reportedly capable of maintaining the hotspots even through fast action and low-light video sequences. Developers can choose among a dozen hotspot attributes, including author-defined shapes, overlay colors, and cursor-overrun reactions.
Ephyx calls this authoring strategy hypervideo--full-motion digital video with embedded hyperlinks to related content through automated means of creating video "hotspots." In accordance with the general concept of hypervideo, these hotspots link moving objects within a video sequence to a variety of media, including static pictures, text, sounds, URLs, other video sequences, or executable software applications. Hotspots are evident to the user either by changes in the cursor shape or on-screen object-specific highlighting. Other features of the V-Active product include automated motion tracking, synchronized playback of multiple media elements streaming simultaneously, and platform independence and support for numerous digital video formats.
The Ephyx software reportedly also enables developers to create applications in which end-users simply click on highlighted objects within a video to link instantly to related content via various connections, including selected URLs. The V-Active product further reportedly permits that hyperlinked videos created with V-Active may be integrated into a variety of environments; a V-Active Director Xtra integrates V-Active interactive video elements into Director applications, while the V-Active ActiveX Control and V-Active Netscape Plug-In embed hyperlinked video into Web pages.
With V-Active, authors can enable pointing and clicking between digital video hotspots, and they can also define any moving objects as gateways to other video sequences or to activating other applications. Interactive video clips produced with V-Active can be integrated into existing environments using a Macromedia Director 5 Xtra and Microsoft Active X control. Refer to the web page and product literature of Ephyx Technologies, P.O. Box 12503, 9 Maskit Street, Herzliya 46733, Israel (http://www.ephyx.com as of 1998).